Re: GuixSD and free hardware

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello!

Gammel Holte <address@hidden> skribis:

> I would like to draw your attention to new Rockchip ARM machines (e.g. Asus
> C201). These are very cheap, easy to reflash and can be run without any
> blobs (except 3D acceleration, unless the Lima driver gets finished). They
> don't even need CPU microcdes. Paul Kocialkowski (of Replicant fame)
> recently added Libreboot support to the C201 [1].
>
> In my opinion, it'd be really nice to have GuixSD polished on this
> architecture, so that users can buy one and get things going with minimal
> effort. Sort of a few reference devices like what BSD does with some
> Thinkpads. If running linux-libre, and wishing to have libreboot as a
> bootloader, there are not that many choices.

I think many of us are interested in having GuixSD on those devices.

Mark recently ported GuixSD to mips, which allowed him to identify
architecture-specific assumptions need to be addressed.  That was an
important first step.

There’s also the question of whether we can use GRUB on these platforms,
since GuixSD pretty much relies on it.  Latest GRUB reportedly works on
(some) ARM platforms:
<https://wiki.linaro.org/LEG/Engineering/Kernel/GRUB>.

It would be good to see if GRUB can be used as the LibreBoot payload on
the C201, as a replacement for ‘depthcharge’.

Thanks,
Ludo’.